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Surgeons perform first permanent penis transplant in South Africa

A 21-year-old man received what South African surgeons believe is the first permanent penis transplant.

The Associated Press reports the transplant was done in a nine-hour operation last December by specialists from the faculty of medicine and health services at the University of Stellenbosch. The patient had his penis amputated three years ago following complications from a circumcision performed in his late teens, the university said.

Circumcisions are performed on boys and young men as a rite of passage to adulthood in some rural parts of South Africa. Stellenbosch University said experts had estimated that there could be as many as 250 penis amputations a year in the country because of botched circumcisions.

For more circumcision controversy see reporter Jane Musgrave’s report on this issue from earlier this week.

The university said it was planning for nine more patients to receive penis transplants. Doctors took to YouTube to talk about the milestone.

The patient, whose name was not released, “has made a full recovery and has regained all function in the newly transplanted organ,” the university near Cape Town in southwestern South Africa said.

The university said “finding a donor was one of the major challenges.”

This was at least the second time a penis transplant has been done. A man in China had the operation but later asked doctors to remove it because of psychological problems experienced by him and his wife.

The new patient is expected to have full use of his transplanted organ in about two years, said Prof. Andre van der Merwe, head of Stellenbosch University’s urology department and leader of the South African surgical team.

“We are very surprised by his rapid recovery,” Van der Merwe said in comments released by the university.

USA Today was a little more explicit in its explanation of the surgery. For one, unlike the patient in China, the recipient is doesn’t have concerns about the previous owner, whose family consented to the surgery.

“The patient accepted the penis as his own,” Van der Merwe told the eNews Channel Africa (eNCA). “He told me in no uncertain terms that the fact it belonged to somebody else is completely out of his mind and he’s moved on with this as his own penis. That’s absolutely the way we want it.”

Van der Merwe indicated that doctors made sure the donor and recipient were of the same race.

“Cosmetically we’ve got a very good match for color,” he said. “We obviously transplanted a good normal penis and the erections that the patient gets are very good.”

Here is a photo of what is being called the “harvesting” being presented to researchers.